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City of Immigrants, Pausing, Offers A Belated Welcome

Immigrants have been helped by The New York Times Neediest Cases Fund since its inception. Adolph S. Ochs, publisher of The Times, began the fund after encountering a pauper, an immigrant, on Christmas night in 1911. Mr. Ochs believed that if readers of his newspaper knew how some of their neighbors lived, they would want to help. So the next year, a reporter searched the files of social service agencies to write about the city's 100 neediest cases. They included an Armenian immigrant who suffered from leprosy and the widow and four children of an Italian immigrant who had died of tuberculosis and who all suffered from the disease. The fund's 85th annual appeal, now under way, runs through Feb. 28. The Times pays all administrative expenses so donations can go directly to services for people who need them. And those who need them, officials of social service agencies say, are increasingly going to be immigrants affected by the new Federal welfare law, which sharply restricts Government assistance for noncitizens, among others. More than two million immigrants live in New York City today, and traditionally, Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan has noted, immigrants are among its hardest workers. ''Those tenement scenes of the Lower East Side were in fact a thriving and prosperous population; they were just packed in,'' he said. ''Emma Lazarus, wherever she is in heaven, has a lot to account for. They weren't the wretched refuse of anybody's shores. They come here to work.'' And work, as they so often find, is not easy to come by. Here are some of their stories.